Anyway. Tomb was pretty easy, if a little slow at times. Once we had the airship picked up Gau. Then dove into the final dungeon for Fixed Dice. Then grabbed the Behemoth Suit as I had issues with Gau's defenses, so I wanted the snow muffler. That wasn't a winning fight yet, so we went into the Ancient Castle and threw a rock at Katana Soul, which as we all know is the ultimate dishonor so they committed seppku and Setzer went from the weakest party member to... well likely still the weakest. He just does damage, after all. Still sometimes that's what you want, won the next fight for the muffler, then dove Pheonix Cave and got Locke.

Now I need to make a list of rages to add to the Veldt and loot Narche. Little Paladin Shield/Rage Grinding and a bit more treasure hunting and we should be good for the end game.

Honestly, I would've made it a 'no Esper' challenge rather than 'no magic'. Sure that leaves the option open of teaching your entire crew the few spells that can be learned off items, not to mention Terra and Celes' natrual magic, but it still keeps you from making everyone statistically identical killing machines, plus it just makes the rules a bit easier to parse re: Rages and Lores and jank.

(Honestly I've been thinking of just going 'screw the rules' and following my own 'No Esper' variant with the characters assigned to me.)

In the World of Ruin, after finding the airship, recruit your assigned characters at the earliest opportunity. Most characters can be recruited without too much trouble, even for an inexperienced party; Umaro and especially Locke are a bit tougher than the rest.

I decided to go forward with my 'No Espers' variation, which I'm already enjoying more than the original ruleset.

I decided to give myself a bit of a boost, all above board of course, by doing some level grinding on Lete River. I used to do this on the original cart as well, just get something to hold down 'A' on a Turbo Controller while on the second loop of Lete River, so I kept going in circles, meanwhile I had Cursor set to 'Memory' so Bannon would keep casting Health. I forget what Terra's level was when I continued, but she had over 1400 HP and knew Fire 2, so Ultros went down like a chump.

But aside from also getting like 100k GP from it, it won't be a huge benefit in the other scenarios. Locke, Edgar, and Sabin drag the level average down enough that Celes only joined at Lv14, and I expect Cyan will be similar. At least Terra's level boost will mean she'll be on par with the rest of the party by the time she rejoins post-Vector.

Speaking of Vector, looking ahead, the one boss fight I'm most worried about will be the one while escaping on the Mode 7 cart ride from the Magitek factory, since I'll have to fight it solo with Cyan (technically I'll have to fight Ultros #2 with only Cyan as well, but he's a bit less concerning). That's probably going to be the last major challenge, aside from a handful of WoR sticking points.